Ableton tutorial 2 recording file operations. This is the second ableton tutorial, its kinda boring, but will show you some cool things about abelton,
were gonna cover – how to record your loops to a track, how to consolidate parts you have made, saving live sets, and exporting wav files

so, fire up abelton.

make a simple loop, one bar will do.

now that you have a wee loop your gonna record it to a track, so at the top of the screen you will see the transport bar (it has a play, stop and record button, a button marked OVR and other stuff)
hit the record button, then press the play button on your clip

youll see ust under the record button that it makes a little pattern where you are recording your track, to see it easier switch views – click the top right hand icons – there are vertical and horizontal markings – click the horizontal ones so your view looks like this

you can see that it has some audio layed down in a track now – this is how you construct songs (kinda)

a few cool things about this view – once you have a cool part down you can consolodate it into one clip
hilight the part you want to make into a loop and right click it, then goto consolidate – it will then make the selection into a loop of its own

this is quite handy – you cant then drag this new loop to the view icon thingy and the view will change to the vertical clip view and you can drop your new clip into an audio track.

Bounce to track

this is a really cool thing in ableton
basically the way that ableton works is that its non-destructive – that is, any change you make to to a file isnt really there – its only within ableton, you dont actually change the audio file. but what if you want to make a new audio file out of the freakish sound you just made ?
well, you could bounce that sound to disk – file > export audio / video
but this is another cool way to do it.

first you need to set the view – goto view > ins/outs
this shows the inputs and outputs for each track – you can get really messy here, but once you get the hang of it its a really powerful thing to use.

on your second audio track (the one you will be recording to) set the input to ‘1-Audio‘ this is then going to record the output from track 1 onto track 2.

play your clip and make sure that the second audio track isnt clipping.
hit the record arm button on the bottom of the second audio track – you’ll notice that the play buttons on the second audio track have now turned to record buttons =)

hit one of the new record buttons on the second audio track and it will record the loop into the new slot for as long as you let it.

saving is easy, you hit file > save
the only thing thats wrong with this is that it doesnt take the music files you have – it only takes the session files – which is ok if you are only on the one machine, but if you want to go to another machine, or give a copy of your session to a friend, etc then you want to include all the samples too.
this is when to do a ‘collect all and save’ from the file menu – it will collect all the samples, make a copy of them and save your set.

well, thats the crappy bits out the way =)

next tutorial will be about plugins and effects, some cool things to do with effects and other stuff like that !